


There’s Always Delivery

by RiaZendira



Series: When you Can't Lead a Horse to Water [1]
Category: White Collar
Genre: Alternate Universe, Multi, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-09
Updated: 2011-12-09
Packaged: 2017-10-27 02:44:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/290800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiaZendira/pseuds/RiaZendira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Neal, it's really all about winning the game. After all, that's all life is, one huge game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There’s Always Delivery

For Neal, it's really all about winning the game. After all, that's all life is, one huge game. You can be the clever one, or you can be the mark. There aren’t a whole lot of other options. Well ok, if you aren’t brilliant, you can find someone more clever than yourself and make yourself indispensable to them, but that’s pretty much just being clever to the best of your ability anyway. And you still have to be careful not to accidentally become a mark via the scapegoat route. 

They might say crime doesn’t pay, but what they really mean is crime shouldn’t pay. Crime always pays, it’s just a matter of making sure the payout matches the risk, and that the adrenaline rush matches the celebration in the end. Once you have that figured out, the rest is just a matter of realizing that even smart people can be dumb sometimes, and not being that person. It’s easy to overlook details, it’s easy to start believing your own press and cocky people make mistakes. 

Neal knows how to compensate for potential mistakes though. To start with, you find some of those clever devoted associates who’s skill sets differ from your own enough to be helpful. Then you make the most of the charms and skills you were graced with. Practice makes perfect. If you’re charming, there’s almost no limit to what you can get away with. If you’re pretty, charming, and believable, there’s no limit at all to the lie you can tell and have people want to believe you. Even if they don’t believe you in the end, that moment of wanting to is like a reference from the company’s founder on your job application. It makes them try to find ways to believe you, and why do all the work of leading the horse to water when you can just suggest to him that he’s already standing by the river and watch him bend his head to drink?

He’s under no delusion that he’s not extraordinarily gifted in the looks and charm department either. That’s part of the reason he avoids things like guns. One weapon at a time, it’s not fair to deprive the rest of the world of all the advantages. Well ok, that’s not really it, but he’s used that line before to amusing results. Mostly, guns, unlike his charm, can be used against him, and if he doesn’t show up with one, that’s one less gun for people to fight over turning on him. And really, the whole game is easy enough without any kind of coercion, so he doesn’t really see why people feel the need to use guns to begin with. Guns aren’t a level playing field, they have no finesse and take very little skill to use. Where’s the challenge in that? The art?

At his deepest core, Neal is an artist. A performer. His body, his hands, they’re all tools to create with. Just because his dance is of wits and thorough review of security blueprints doesn’t make it any less valid than your typical modern ballet. (Most of the time, he feels his aesthetic choices are far superior to those made with regard to modern ballets anyway.) The biggest problem with being a master thief instead of a master painter is that he’s best performances don’t have very big intended audiences, and where’s an artist to get his review? A master artist creates for his own enjoyment, but he still needs at least a single viewer to be sure he’s created something solid. One cannot create in a vacuum. One must have someone that substantiates one’s work simply by being. 

When he first started as a con artist, he thought he’d get audience and reviewer all in one with his marks. His success in pulling off a con would make the success of his art clear to him at least. If he didn’t get any negative reviews, this was clearly like a standing ovation for the symphony. No one suspecting that he was even being such an artist was review in of itself. He found it felt hollow after the first few cons though. His audience couldn’t possibly appreciate his art. They weren’t really even seeing his art if he was doing it right. And there was no way for him to stop and explain it to them. No, marks didn’t make a very appreciative audience at all. 

For a while after that, his audience was Moz, and Moz was a good audience because he could understand the art form going on in front of him. But Moz was always more like a fellow performer from an allied guild. He may not have been a fellow painter, but he was an excellent stone mason, and Moz could always figure out how Neal did things. For a while it was great fun to see if Moz could figure out the hows, to talk about how their approaches would have differed, to wallow in fellow feeling. After a while though, it got boring talking shop with someone who could effortlessly talk shop right back. Moz made a better co-conspirator and fellow artist than he did audience. And his reviews had always had a too much panic and conspiracy theory for Neal’s tastes.

Then came Kate. Kate was pretty, and even seemed smart at first. And she looked up to him, wanted to be inspired by him. Neal was certain that for Kate, he’d steal anything, because she believed he could. If she believed, he would make it so. Kate was always amazed when he pulled off each command performance. But Kate was never satisfied to sit back and appreciate a job well done. She always wanted more. And she never seemed to appreciate the details of each perfect artwork. She just wanted them given to her, finished and complete, with no effort required on her part to comprehend them. Such an uneducated audience gets old too quickly.

After Kate, Neal wasn’t sure where to go for his review. The game hadn’t quite lost its charm, but it was certainly wearing thin. The art still satisfied, he didn’t do it for anyone else after all, but he wasn’t happy with his life. He’d never before been able to separate the two, art and life, one that satisfied, one that didn’t. For a master artist who lived and loved the game of life, such a conflicting outlook was nearly impossible to reconcile. 

It was a profound realization when it finally hit him. All the more profound for being so oddly obvious in retrospect. He’d been pitching his art to the wrong audience all his life. He’d been tossing away grand efforts on those who were either fooled by them, or those who were also trying to fool. He was wasting the best of his art on those who were fellow artists, or barely educated in how to hold the paint brush. Didn’t there have to be a third possible audience? One who could review impartially, with education about art but no desire to do it themselves? Where was the art critic of the world of the con? 

And there it went, his lightbulb moment. Of course there was such a person. What else were cops for than to appreciate a good crime, but with no desire to replicate it. That was the moment when Neal Caffery set out to find his perfect audience. Since he was a master thief, no mere street cop would be his due. No, he needed an officer of the law who could match his caliber. One with education, good taste, and common sense. A dash of brains, brawn and beauty wouldn’t hurt either. The perfect reviewer must be of similar levels of talent as what he’s reviewing. 

The hunt for such a reviewer took him a few years, but he was willing to put in the effort for the pay off. Research, testing of hypothesis, and a few dangled bread crumbs of evidence later and he had his perfect audience in the form of FBI agent Peter Burke. The man had already managed to put together a few of Neal’s past cons as being by the same artist, even if he had no idea that said artist was Neal. That alone showed that Agent Burke was the right choice. The fact that he actually found the evidence that Neal planted cemented Agent Burke as being worthy of the task. 

Now all that remained was alerting Agent Burke of his newly appointed prominent position. To be sporting, he was even going to give the agent a name to attach to his vague case files. Neal pulled a cell phone from his pocket and dialed. 

“Delivery please. Yes, I’m wondering, can you deliver a couple of your specialty pizzas to a vehicle if I tell you the exact street corner it’s parked on? There’s a good tip in it for you.... Wonderful, thanks so much. And could you make sure to tell my friends in the van that it’s compliments of their pal, Neal Caffrey? Thank you, I really appreciate it. Great, let me just give you this credit card number....”

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at: http://riazendira.dreamwidth.org/14675.html where more author's notes are available.


End file.
